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What are the crucial turning points in a
person's career, or in the career of a business? Are they organisational
changes? Lucky job offers? Market developments? Or are they occasions
of individual change, of personal, organic development'?
Mark Pavan, Managing Principal of Mapa,
has no doubt.
In the early 1980s Pavan was a typical bright young graduate in a good
marketing job with a blue-chip industrial company. It was, he says, "A
comfortable number with a comfortable future." But the very comfort
irked, so he took himself off to the London Business School and graduated
with an MBA in 1985. With one shift of the gear stick Mark Pavan had accelerated
out of the comfort zone into the world of possibilities.
"Sometimes it's called beginner's arrogance." he says, "But
I believe the early surge that some people make is based on a real conviction
that there are better ways to do things. When you confront something like
a good MBA programme, the adrenaline starts to build. Sure the course
gives you knowledge and techniques, but it gives you more important things
- standards to reach for, new questions to ask, and the courage to go
on asking them."
For Pavan this meant letting go the safety line of his big company employment
and creating a way to practice his conviction that "there are better
ways to do things". It meant the formation of the Mapa management
consultancy business.
For ten years Mapa grew and its clients flourished - to such an extent,
indeed, that by 1997 Mark Pavan thought he felt on his neck the first
dangerous breath of complacency.
"I needed to do something to generate a change of pace," he
says. "Take a sabbatical, go on a course, throw some sand in the
oyster." Then a client recommended an extraordinary course he had
just been on, at Jo Ouston & Co.
"I was vaguely aware of JO & Co. There was a certain buzz in
MBA circles about the work they were doing in the area of personal and
management development. Anyway, it sounded like something different so
I signed on for a six-day programme called 'Developing Personal Presence'.
I little knew just how different it would be."
On most training courses, Pavan believes, you expect to be given tools
and techniques for clearly defined skills, with quantifiable measurements
of performance. You will be able to fly higher, they suggest, because
new wings have been handed out and bolted on.
"But at JO & Co - quite disturbingly - the course was not about
techniques, but about me. I could not fly on the wings of others, I was
told, but only on my own resources, so I had better learn to understand
them. It was in many ways a brutal message, but it was delivered with
a great amount of support, insight and encouragement. It was the most
important lesson I have learned since I left the London Business School
in 1985."
Mark Pavan went back to Jo Ouston & Co in 2000, to repeat the course.
Why'?
"The seeds planted in 1997 didn't all spring up at once. Some of
them took a long time to grow, and I realised that there was more to build
on, more to discover. Maybe I was ready to take another step up in my
own growth, to break out past another layer before I could make the next
breakthrough for the business."
Mapa has been a considerable success, not just in volume growth, but through
innovation and a widening of activities. Mark Pavan is emphatic that business
growth has to come from the personal growth of the people involved, and
that has to emanate from the top.
You can visit the website of Mapa at www.mapa-uk.com.
Mark's personal site, containing a series of articles on practical
management and marketing issues, can be found at www.markpavan.com
>back to top
Copyright Jo Ouston & Company Limited 2000-2008
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